Phillippa Pitts

Phillippa Pitts is a Horowitz Foundation Fellow for American Art at Boston University. Her research works to expand the range of methods and objects that we use to tell the story of American art, with a particular interest in challenging geographic and cultural borders; incorporating tactile, embodied, and materials knowledge; and reparative justice frameworks, particularly as relates to indigeneity and Indigenous rights. From September 2023-August 2024, Phillippa will be in residence in Washington D.C. as the Wyeth Foundation Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Phillippa’s dissertation applies a critical disability studies lens to the surge of artistic production around health and wellness inspired by the establishment of a “medical democracy” in the antebellum United States. By illuminating the ways in which artists created meaning around the myriad substances consumed as medicine within the Jacksonian laissez-faire market, this study expands our analysis of pharmaceutical visuality from the conventional spheres of packaging and promotions into print culture, botanical illustration, and grand landscape painting. In uncovering pharmacoepic imaginaries in unexpected places, the project reveals a deep yet under-theorized current within American art, and models how disability theory can unsettle our understanding of even well-studied topics in art history.

Having returned to doctoral work after a decade in museum practice, Phillippa remains passionate about equity, inclusion, and accessibility in the arts. At Boston University, Phillippa has worked with the Center for Teaching & Learning to develop high-impact strategies for remote learning and innovative approaches to ELL and UDL inclusion in the classroom.

Phillippa’s research has been generously supported by the ACLS/Luce Foundation; Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CASVA); the American Antiquarian Society; Winterthur Museum, Library, and Gardens; the Library Company of Philadelphia; the William H. Clements Library at the University of Michigan; the Beaze and Harry Adelson Research Fund; the Boston University Women’s Guild; and the Kress Foundation. Phillippa has held positions and fellowships at the Portland Museum of Art (Maine), Portland Art Museum (Oregon), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the ICA/Boston, among others. Her work has been published by Panorama: The Journal of the Historians of American Art, The Journal of Museum Education, and MuseumsEtc. She is the winner of a 2019 Excellence in Writing award from Routledge/The Museum Education Roundtable, and a 2014 Special Mention for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching from Tufts University. Phillippa holds an A.B. in the History of Art, Visual Arts, and International Relations from Brown University and an M.A. in the History of Art and Museum Studies from Tufts.

Research Interests:

• Fine and Popular Arts of the United States
• Disability Studies
• Indigeneity and Indigenous Rights

Dissertation in Progress:
“Pharmacoepic Dreams: Art and America’s Medical Democracy, 1800-1860″

M.A. Thesis:
“Truth and Representation: Exploring History, Visuality, and Trauma in Blitz Era Britain” (2014)

2020-2021:

• Senior Editor, SEQUITUR
• Teaching Fellow, AH395
• Graduate Symposium Coordinator

2019-2020:

• Junior Editor, SEQUITUR
• GSHAAA Secretary